walking upstream…
Ava Max
sourcesInterview Magazine — Ava Max Is Listening to Destiny's Child, Mariah Carey, and Rihanna (Britney Spears 'Toxic' video quote) · Billboard — Ava Max Talks 'My Oh My' Single, Upcoming 3rd Album (Britney Spears videos as visual inspiration) · Grammy.com — Ava Max Is Reborn On 'Don't Click Play' (Britney Spears / Christina Aguilera formative-idol quote) · Facebook / Ava Max — 'Beautiful' (Christina Aguilera cover) (cover posting, caption) · Vanity Fair — On the Rise · Wikipedia
In 2016, at a Los Angeles party, an unsigned singer named Amanda Ava Koci walked up to hitmaking producer Cirkut and serenaded him with "Happy Birthday." He gave her his number. Born in Milwaukee to Albanian immigrant parents and raised mostly in Virginia, she'd already failed at pop stardom once, as a teenager in Los Angeles, before trying again at seventeen. That party led to "Sweet but Psycho" (2018), a stomping, dark-hearted single that topped charts in more than twenty countries and set the template for her debut album, Heaven & Hell (2020): glossy, belted, hook-first dance-pop built for choruses meant to be shouted back. Diamonds & Dancefloors (2023) and Don't Click Play (2025) followed. Ava Max writes pop as armor — turning a bullied childhood into anthems built to be sung at full volume by whoever needs one.
the sound in question
2018
Sweet but PsychoAva Max
walk the tributaries ↓
Mariah Carey1990s–2000s · Pop / R&B / Soul
Amanda Koci was still learning English after school in Virginia, but on the drive home every afternoon the car stereo played Mariah Carey. "I would sing 'Visions of Love' over and over for a year straight," she remembered years later. "After that, I just started singing more." That backseat obsession set the template Ava Max still leads with: across interviews five years apart, when asked her biggest influence, she names Carey first, before anyone else, every time.
listen: upstream & heresource: Billboard — Chartbreaker ↗
1990
Vision of LoveMariah Carey
2020
Kings & QueensAva Max
listen for"Even in my pop music you can kind of hear the soul, because I sang her a lot," Max has said of Carey. Listen for it on the hook of "Kings & Queens": where a lesser pop chorus would just repeat the title phrase flat, she stretches it into a held, climbing note — the same melismatic reach Carey rides through the closing key change of "Vision of Love," a whole vocal lineage compressed into one word.
Britney Spears1990s–2000s · Teen pop / Dance-pop / Pop
Profiles from her 2019 breakout already cast Ava Max as obsessive about Britney Spears, a fan chasing the same career — and Max has since spelled out exactly why. "Britney Spears taught me how to be a woman — from a girl to woman, right?" she told Grammy.com in 2025. "They taught me that pop music was, like, it for me."
listen: upstream & heresource: PAPER — Ava Max Talks Quarantine and How Khaleesi Inspired Her New Single (names Mariah Carey, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera as top influences) ↗
2003
ToxicBritney Spears
2024
My Oh MyAva Max
listen forAsked years later which music video shaped her most, Max didn't hesitate: "So, 'Toxic.' I thought was really iconic because it was just such a great theme and it was so animated... It inspired us to do creative things." Billboard later reported the debt was still active in 2024, when the video for her single "My Oh My" drew visibly on the Britney Spears clips she'd grown up watching — both built around a tense, propulsive dance-pop pulse engineered to peak exactly when the chorus does.
Christina Aguilera2000s · Pop / R&B / Soul
Christina Aguilera is the one influence Ava Max didn't just talk about — she recorded. "I grew up listening to Mariah Carey and a lot of pop divas like Christina Aguilera... and a lot of Whitney, a lot of Christina. I love to growl," she told Popdust in 2020, the same year she posted a full solo cover of Aguilera's 2002 ballad "Beautiful," captioned simply: "Beautiful cover, because you are beautiful."
listen: upstream & heresource: Popdust — Ava Max talks 'Kings & Queens' and Her Debut Album (Mariah Carey / Christina Aguilera 'growl' quote) ↗
2002
BeautifulChristina Aguilera
2020
Beautiful (Christina Aguilera cover)Ava Max
listen forThe catalogue offers a rare direct comparison: the same song, twice. Aguilera's original builds from a hushed, resigned verse into one held, belted line on the chorus — the moment the song is remembered for. Max's cover keeps that arrangement nearly untouched, leaning into the rasped chest tone she calls her "growl," the one she says she picked up from singing Aguilera and Whitney Houston as a kid rather than reinventing a note of it.